I'm practicing my photo editing skills @ the moment. I've done too much geometry and other non photo work on Photoshop so I think it's about time I give actual photo editing a shot. Anyhow, here's the original and the retouched version. The original was a pretty highly compressed JPEG and the photo retouch is the same file, blown up to 640x640 and then smoothed... it looks so plastic.... *bleh*. Anyhow, some tips/encouragement would be nice.

But yeah, I've been thoroughly over-using the healing brush and blurs. Can anyone give me some pointers on other tools I may use? Right now, I'm very stuck on figuring out how the heck to clean up that yellowish string around her arm, clear the noise around her hair, and fix the blurriness and sketchiness of her left are behind her pillow.

berniebernie

12-29-2003, 01:15 PM

try using the patch tool sometimes instead of the healing brush; select the orange shape with a lasso (or a small part of the orange thung) and using the patch tool (set patch:source, not destination) drag the selected area inside a 'clean' portion of the arm, it should help around..

Oh and since this is a low-qal photo you're probably going to have problems cleaning up all the blurs - maybe you should paint over them, i dont know...

singularity2006

12-29-2003, 05:57 PM

ah, cool, thanks. I'll give that a shot. Man, the enlarged version looked horrendous. It pixelated and got super funky colored when I blew it up. But then again, correcting this stuff is kind of fun. Anyhow, any tips on how to correct the hair?

schmu_20mol

12-31-2003, 12:14 AM

i'd check out that lighting with an adjustment layer> curves... after that applied you'll perhaps find it easier to go on

atw

12-31-2003, 12:55 AM

Try converting the image to different colour modes (L*a*b, CMYK, Greyscale(?)) and see if one of those isolates the noise / artefacts into a single channel. If it does blur that channel.

In an ideal world converting to L*a*b would isolate the noise into the a & b channels and you could just blur those (all the detail is in the (L)ightness channel) :)

"Every image has 10+ channels" (it used to be more until Adobe ditched HSB) :(

singularity2006

12-31-2003, 04:29 AM

much thanks for the tip. I'll try the conversions. Of all things in Photoshop, channels are something I actually haven't used. Time to learn. ^.^

There is a lot of pixelation going on in both images, that is always hard to get rid of.

oh, and check out http://www.retouchpro.com/ for some more tips if you havent already!

singularity2006

01-17-2004, 07:04 AM

niiiccceee..... I seem to get a better effect (the softness of the healing brush and smudge tool are visually more appealing to me for some reason) manually using the tools and going over the image section by section than applying settings to the image as a whole. And thanks for reminding me of the link. I went through the site at first but got lost in all the material and couldn't find a "tips" section. I'll have to take a look again... but yeah, after school started, I've been kind of just blah... haven't had any time to edit my korean pop star in a while.. *sigh* .... though I am having quite a lot of fun cruising back and forth between school while listening to her material. ^.^